Medialab

Slava Gerovitch teaches history of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He holds two PhDs: one in philosophy of science (from the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences and Technology in Moscow) and one in history and social study of science and technology (from MIT's Science, Technology and Society Program). He has written extensively on the history of Soviet mathematics, cybernetics, cosmonautics, and computing. He is the author of From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (MIT, 2002), which won an honorable mention for the Vucinich Book Prize for an outstanding monograph in Russian studies, Voices of the Soviet Space Program: Cosmonauts, Soldiers, and Engineers Who Took the USSR into Space (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and Soviet Space Mythologies: Public Images, Private Memories, and the Making of a Cultural Identity (University of Pittsburgh, 2015), the winner of the Gardner-Lasser Aerospace History Literature Award and a finalist for the Historia Nova Prize for the best book on Russian intellectual and cultural history. His current research project, based on more than 90 oral interviews, is to study the “parallel social infrastructure” of Soviet mathematics, which the mathematical community created to circumvent political and administrative barriers at official academic institutions.